Fleetwood Mac in Chicago

Looking through my new acquisitions shelf, I’m realizing that I have bought a lot of blues in the past several years. Hell, I’ve bought a lot of blues in the last several months. These days, if I’m just looking for any old thing to play, it’s probably gonna be either blues or funk.

Back in 2020, in one of the last jaunts before the lockdown, I picked up Volume One of Blues Jam in Chicago (for the ridiculously low price of $4.99). Great disc that got a lot of play in those months that required some blues.

Then last November, on Black Friday Record Store day, I made a trip up to MaTones in Collegeville looking for something I hadn’t found here in town, and ended up tripping on this – volumes one and two stuck together in one. Weirdly, they split the volumes up – the tracks from volume one are sides one and three of this collection.

These are essentially live jams, recorded in the Chess studios in a single day, and they’re just great – loose, improv style blues on some very established songs and some of Fleetwood Mac’s own works.

So yeah, it’s some more of the same, but I’ve got no complaints about it – some of the all-time Chicago blues greats like Otis Spann, Big Walter Horton, and of course Willie Dixon, with some of the all-time British blues greats from a little band called Fleetwood Mac, kicking it live in 1969? Okay, it could have gone wrong, but it sure didn’t.

The new tracks, that I didn’t have on Volume One largely feature Jeremy Spencer doing a slew of Elmore James tunes (no surprise, as much of 1968’s “Mr. Wonderful” is or sounds like Elmore James), Danny Kirwan doing Danny Kirwan songs and a Jimmy Rogers tune, and two absolute greats from Otis Spann, including “Hungry Country Girl,” which just kills.